Analyzing conflicts, crime and violence through complexity

Abstract

Conflicts over natural resources, environmental crimes, and illicit markets constitute interconnected phenomena that reinforce one another through complex interactions involving armed groups, organized crime, institutional weaknesses, and legal actors. These dynamics generate violence, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and significant economic and social costs while creating self-reinforcing systems sustained by illicit financial flows and criminal networks. Despite the growing literature on these issues, their clandestine nature, heterogeneous actors, and nonlinear interactions make them difficult to analyze using conventional approaches.

This thesis applies the framework of complexity theory to examine the interdependence between conflict, environmental crime, and organized crime. Drawing on concepts such as emergence, adaptation, and nonlinearity, it combines game theory, network theory, and agent-based modeling to investigate how interactions among heterogeneous agents produce systemic outcomes. The research is organized into three complementary studies.

The first study develops a two-stage network game to analyze rent dissipation in conflicts over natural resources, demonstrating how network structures, alliances, rivalries, and power asymmetries shape economic losses. The model is calibrated using the Sudanese gold conflict. The second study employs an agent-based model to simulate cocaine trafficking through container shipping between South America and Europe, evaluating the effects of corruption, inspection capacity, and ship size on trafficking outcomes. Simulation results reveal that corruption substantially weakens enforcement efforts and creates opportunities for organized crime. The third study presents a theoretical network model to examine the relationship between enforcement costs, coordination, and social acceptability in interventions designed to sustain cooperation and prevent corruption, showing that effective enforcement depends on both network topology and the distribution of influential actors.

Taken together, the findings demonstrate that conflicts, environmental crimes, and illicit markets should be understood as components of an adaptive complex system rather than as isolated phenomena. By integrating multiple complexity-based methodologies, this thesis provides new theoretical and quantitative tools to better understand these interactions and offers insights for designing more effective policies to reduce violence, environmental degradation, and organized criminal activity.